Blogging

Most of my freshmen rhetoric students choose current topics – off-shoring, CAFTA, privatized social security, the 10% rule–for their series of argumentative papers. (I’ve given up on legalizing drugs; I never got one that was coherent. While I’m sympathetic with the positions expressed on this blog, reading these made me doubt their authors had time or brain cells to waste on recreational drugs. Indeed, their lives seemed pretty much recreational.)

This semester, I added another option. They could choose among some controversial books, read the book, and analyze one of its major arguments. Rhoads, Hayek, Pinker, Lomberg challenge orthodoxies; only a couple of ambitious students chose to do this, but they are becoming quite engaged. Of course, I have an agenda, but since they have to neutrally define the controversy, then write papers both for & against, the goal is less which side than increased understanding.

One girl chose Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously, but has been having trouble finding arguments or reviews. This is her first semester in college, but I suspect this is not just her lack of research skills. Some studies are best left unreviewed. Last week, I approached one of my colleagues from psych and asked if she knew of any work specifically countering his arguments. She hadn’t heard of it.

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During the last few years, I’ve felt myself buoyed time and again when I turn to blogs—ours and others. Many are free market; they have a more tragic view of man than pure libertarians do (and much wiser), but are generally resilient and more likely to see the glass half-full. The “open marketplace” is optimistic – it may take us a while to sort out the best ideas, the best beliefs, the best products, but in the end we do. This attitude trusts man—his heart & his reason.

One of my favorite metaphors was Glenn Reynolds’ “not a herd but a pack.” It seemed to bode well: it describes 9/11, when the first plane loads in New York had one perspective on high-jacking but the one in Pennsylvania, with a new paradigm, coordinated and acted. It is Victor Davis Hanson’s perspective on war. It is a bracing and attractive meme. And in the great tragedy of this week some took action. The New Orleans news is full of charity and the beauty of a country that opens its arms, pocketbooks and even homes to others. Hours away from Houston, our community is filling centers and churches; my daughter talks of the girl from New Orleans new to her class.

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I love BlogAds, but sometimes it looks like their servers are slow and that that problem sometimes causes our blog to hang, on my browser anyway, when it’s loading. As an experiment, I removed the BlogAds from the ChicagoBoyz front page while leaving them on the individual-archive pages (e.g., this one) and our Contributors’ page. The result, for me at least, is that the page without the ads loads much faster. The question that I have for readers is, do you experience any of the same difficulty with slow-loading pages that I am experiencing? I’d really like to figure out what the problem is, so that I can fix it. I hope it’s the result of a coding error on my part.

UPDATE: OK, first update ever before I published a post. I see that the slow-loading problem has disappeared for the moment. That suggests that a server issue is responsible. At any rate this problem is intermittent, so I am not reassured by its current absence.

UPDATE2: I’m deactivating BlogAds from all pages until the problem is resolved.

Those comment spammers, dontchya love ‘em? Steven den Beste tried to leave a comment earlier in the day, and his immortal prose was blocked by our MT Blacklist anti-spam utility. Seems that a spammer slipped a little something in the URL line which prevented anyone from using the letters “DE”. Clever of them.

Clever, and yet oh so annoying.

It’s fixed now, but I thought it would be a good idea if I stepped up to the podium and said a few words to our readers.

I’m not an admin here, and I don’t set policy. That means your comment might be deleted due to content and language that Jonathan or Lexington find offensive and there’s not anything I can do about it. (Not that I’d want to, since anything that pisses off Lex or Jonathan automatically pisses me off as well.) But keep in mind that I can get into the Blacklist and make changes. If anyone has any problems they can drop me a line at james_43202@yahoo.com and I’ll get right on it.

That is all. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

As we contemplate turning our garage into an apartment/study, we think about money & life. How long will we use it, how many offspring of offspring will fill this house in the years & holidays between now & the nursing home–or death; well, let’s move on. How many marriages in that backyard? Should we borrow? Should we wait?

And so we make decisions and live with them. We “buy into” them, taking responsibility, recognizing in these choices we impose order (meaning? disorder?) on our lives. This prompts self-consciousness and opposes fatalism. It has similarities with the “break it; own it” mantra cited so often as Powell’s “Pottery Barn strategy.” But it makes the concept personal and even profound. (Not that we fool ourselves; life remains tragic and unpredictable – except for the inevitable death. But if we concentrate on these, we may miss how much we can do.)

Money is a means to an end. A home, a place for our children, a place where we can happily set up our bookcases & computers & live out our lives – that’s the end. I suspect most of us see it as the British saw reason – a means to the end of a good life. Franklin & Thoreau, so different in so many ways, want us to recognize in this exchange our time (life) is one good, money is the means; therefore, we should think a bit about what is worth our life. Of course, for some money is symbol – like Lance Armstrong’s yellow shirt. In the rough and tumble of some exchanges money certifies right decisions, risks taken – the self isn’t certified by the money but by the wisdom of choices which produced it.

Status & our desire for approval are great. While a rich area to contemplate this hot summer, first let’s talk about the simplest marker: money.

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